Last night at Pratt Institute, some poor dude asked Spike Lee if he might see “the other side” — that is, the good side — of Brooklyn’s gentrification. While I don’t know for sure that Spike’s sleepy eyes got big and buggy, I like to imagine that that’s what happened as this went down. Read More

I told him that I resented it. That I wasn’t even from D.C. and it still got on my nerves. That the people who had endured the crack heads and the crack-related shootings and the crack smoking mayor wouldn’t be the ones to enjoy the spiffed up buildings and the patio brunch specials. That the freshmen at Howard would probably be more inclined to get money than get involved on campus, because Froyo aint cheap and neither are those bright red Capital Bike Share bikes. And this, I said, and that, I said, and don’t forget about the other thing, I said — just like I had the night before, standing in the exact same spot, with a different homie, off a different kind of Jack.

My blogmate Monica has been banging this drum for a minute, but John Sides looks at some new research that contradicts a bunch of the ideas about the voting habits of working class whites. Sides finds that the white working class is hardly a monolith, and says that studies show that they’re less motivated by Read More

It is not odd or foreign to be able to appreciate the beauty in sad things—the carcass of a rose bathed in moonlight on the pavement. A final goodbye between old lovers. The ever-present hunger of homelessness. Wait, what?